In January 1995, according to this new book by Joseph Cirincione, “Russian military officials mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a US submarine-launched ballistic missile.” Moments later, Boris Yeltsin earned the surely unwanted distinction of becoming “the first Russian president to ever have the nuclear suitcase open in front of him.”

Yeltsin had just several minutes to decide whether to attack the United States with “a barrage of nuclear missiles,” and, Cirincione says, it is believed that his most trusted military advisers were telling him that “he had to launch.”

Luckily for all of us, Yeltsin realized that they, and his radar systems, were wrong.

So while Americans were partying to the music of TLC and Boyz II Men and settling in for the televised drama of the O.J. Simpson trial, we unknowingly came just minutes from devastation, a global nuclear war that would have left hundreds of millions dead in the US alone; our nation, as well as much of the rest of the world, decimated and unrecognizable; and the US and Russia “doubtful . . . [to] ever recover as viable nation-states.”

Cirincione, president of the nuclear policy foundation The Ploughshares Fund, notes that while there are currently 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world, this represents a significant reduction — a demented form of progress.

By the early 1980s, there were “almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over one million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.”

Since then, thanks to various treaties like START in the 1980s, “between 1992 and 2012, the nuclear weapons carried by long-range US and Russian missiles and bombers decreased by 74 percent.”

One thing that hasn’t changed is that the US and Russia still hold about 95% of the world’s nukes, which today equals a bit more than 4,500 nuclear warheads each. (Those into Pyrrhic victories can take comfort in knowing that we have about 1,500 more than the Russians, for about 4,650.)

But whether nuclear stockpiles shrink or grow, there’s a depressing familiarity to the lack of security surrounding them.

“The Department of Defense has a report documenting 32 nuclear weapon accidents between 1950 and 1980.

These include incidents where a total of six nuclear weapons were lost and never recovered,” Cirincione writes. “The department also tallied up 1,152 ‘moderately serious’ nuclear false alarms between 1977 and 1984 — or roughly three per week.”

After the US and Russia, the force of the remaining nuclear powers might surprise, with — in various states of readiness — France in third with 300 nuclear weapons, China in fourth with an estimated 240, Britain with 225, Israel joining India and Pakistan with an estimated 80-100 each, and, bringing up the rear, North Korea, with three nuclear devices tested, but “no signs of operational delivery vehicles” despite their boasting to the contrary.

And with the recent Iranian nuclear talks in the news, it’s worth noting that Cirincione emphasizes that the world’s greatest nuclear threat is neither North Korea nor Iran.

“Iran does not have (and may never have) nuclear weapons, and North Korea has only a few,” he writes. “Both of these nations are more isolated and face more international pressure than ever before. This makes a negotiated solution to these programs more feasible or, failing that, their containment and deterrence.”

The clear winner as the gravest nuclear danger, he writes, is Pakistan, and not just for the threat of terrorists grabbing unsecured nukes from their stockpile — although that is certainly a concern — but for the blind hatred between them and India, and their declared willingness to use nukes given the longtime acrimony between the two nations.

Examining both Pakistan’s handling of nukes and the state of relations between the two countries, the news is consistently awful.

“Pakistan has the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world . . . that could grow to 150 to 200 within this decade,” he writes, noting that these numbers far exceed earlier projections, and adding that “the rate of Pakistan’s stockpile growth may even increase over the next 10 years.”

There are no easy answers, of course, but Cirincione — who says that compared to Cold War decades past, “The threat of a global thermonuclear war today is low” — believes that continued reductions by the US and Russia are key to containing the spread of these weapons worldwide, due to both the obvious lesser availability, and through the leadership example we set for the world.

Quoting an article in Foreign Affairs, he relays a seemingly obvious statement that nevertheless remains contentious to this day.

“The more nuclear weapons there are in the world,” the article’s authors write, “the more likely it is that terrorists will get their hands on one.”